Everyone has that band or artist, the one that initiated you into the fan relationship. Your every musical thought was directly related to the music, which spoke to you more than anybody else out there. They got you like no one ever had or ever would. It was a case of music speaking for itself and generating the emotional connection that music has always elicited from fans.

With the rise of technology, the interaction between that of fan and their favorite band or artist has changed dramatically. The messages of mega stars once conveyed by their record label or by their publicist are now coming directly from the band or artist. The middleman has effectively (in most cases) been eliminated. As such this has freed up the realm of how bands or artists communicate with their fans.

This new freedom has allowed many ways for band and artists to communicate and interact with their fans. Some efforts have been blissfully successful and others have been dismal. Certain factors that used to be set by the sales people at record labels have now been set up as “pay as you go” or “pay as much as you can afford” effectively changing price points forever.

Partly inspired by reading an article on LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman, in this month’s Wired magazine, I think it would be interesting and important to measure just which methods of fan interaction are working. Across music platforms, record labels, or marketing strategies, it would be interesting to get different bands or artists to submit their marketing information, statistics, and analytical information to a third party to have this information analyzed.

After doing some initial research, I came across a few articles that mention successful strategies but those are measured in terms of how much money the artist made off their strategy. I want to see how effective fan interaction is, how much it correlates with releasing an album and how much money is really made off of these “genuine” interactions with bands.

Before embarking on any endeavor it would be great to gauge and see if this would be something people might be interested in submitting to. Any band or artist across any genre would be able to submit if they met the following parameters. Those parameters would be:

-must be in an album cycle or ready to begin one

-have accounts set up on Facebook, Twitter, and other relevant social networking sites

-must be actively engaged with their fans

-must have a marketing strategy or organic plan

It would be great to see if there is such a quantifiable correlation between fan interaction and album sales. If anyone would be interested in submitting to the study that would be great. Please feel free to reach out to me via my profile here on Music Think Tank.

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